Triple threat: the trouble with theatrical trilogies | Stage | The Guardian Mark Lawson's Theatre studies Triple threat: the trouble with theatrical trilogies Dramatic triptychs – from Aeschylus’s Oresteia to Rona Munro’s James plays – are expensive to stage and bum-numbing to watch. Do they deliver three times the pleasure? Rare form … Sofie Gråbøl and Jamie Sives in The True Mirror, the third part of Rona Munro’s James trilogy. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian Share on Messenger Close Like a maternity ward deluged with multiple births, contemporary British writing is full of triplets. In literature, Hilary Mantel and Will Self are working on the final parts of trilogies featuring, respectively, the historical Thomas Cromwell and the fictional Dr Zack Busner. And, in theatre, Rona Munro’s sequence of linked plays about Scottish Kings – James I, James II and James III – have just transferred from the National Theatre of Scotland to the National Theatre of Great Britain in London. While novelistic trios are relatively common, the form is much rarer in theatre.

The reasons are largely logistical: literary trilogies can be published and read over a period of years, but multi-part plays make most sense when performed in repertory, hugely multiplying budgets and rehearsal time, and requiring theatre-goers to commit three evenings or (on special three-in-one days) an entire Saturday. In their shape, Munro’s The James Plays continue a dramatic tradition stretching back two and a half millennia to Aeschylus , although The Oresteia is the only surviving example of what are thought to have been many works by the Greek playwright in which a character or historical event was dramatised in three separate chapters. In modern times, a key example is Arnold Wesker’s turn-of-the-60s trilogy comprising Roots, Chicken Soup With Barley and I’m Talking About Jerusalem, his escalating examinations of the nature of Judaism finding a sort of Irish equivalent around three decades later in Billy Roche’s haunting The Wexford Trilogy , which presents a triple perspective on a rural community. A small-town American family in the Vietnam era is also progressively explored in The Talley Trilogy by the American writer Lanford Wilson .

Wilson, Roche and Wesker all built up their trilogies progressively, with gaps around the earlier parts, as did David Hare, whose examinations of a trinity of British institutions – the church in Racing Demon (1990), the law in Murmuring Judges (1991) and politics in The Absence of War (1993) – were presented as a formal sequence only with the opening of the final play . Contrastingly, as with the Munros, the three parts of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests (1973) were premiered together, as, on a single Saturday in 2002, were Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage, the constituent parts of Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia , his biographical triptych about 19th-century Russian revolutionaries and writers.

The most notable super-size play of late 20th-century American theatre was an epic two-parter – Tony Kushner’s Angels in America – but the rule of three applied to Neil Simon’s autobiographical string of alphabetically branded plays: Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985) and Broadway Bound (1986). Return readers will know that I maintain a rather lonely campaign for the greatness of a Scottish threesome: the pieces variously known as The Slab Boys or Paisley Patterns trilogies, written in the late 70s, drawing on his experiences while working in a carpet factory, by the writer-artist John Byrne. And space should be found for the only sequential piece of theatre inspired by a cheeky pun: while the Hare trilogy was running at the National, the great theatrical joker Ken Campbell, who had rather fewer than three hairs on his head, declared that his new show for the NT would be called The Bald Trilogy.

Pinterest Voyage, the first part of Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia trilogy Photograph: Tristram Kenton/Guardian The purest theatrical three-parters are probably The Norman Conquests and The Oresteia because each instalment is narratively and thematically connected to the others. With an architectural beauty remarkable even from the masterly craftsman Ayckbourn, his plays feature the same characters in different parts of one house over a weekend. Although the works can be watched separately, the pleasure is greatly increased by seeing them in turn. An obvious risk of writing a trilogy of plays that can stand alone is that chunks of the trilogy will be stood up. Wesker’s Chicken Soup With Barley often goes out alone, while Hare’s Racing Demon is very rarely staged with its sister pieces. Belfry, the finale of Roche’s Wexford Trilogy, is about to finish a short solo run in London .

Three works by Martin McDonagh – The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Cripple of Inishmaan – have all been single hits in London or on Broadway at different times, although each technically belongs to one of the two trilogies into which the Irish writer’s work can be divided. Conversely, the creative jeopardy of writing a trilogy in one go is that exhaustion can tangibly set in during the later stages, as I felt watching the National Theatre version of The Coast of Utopia (Stoppard later achieved greater creative evenness in a rewrite for a New York staging), and also the Edinburgh premieres of The James Plays. It seemed to me that another problem Munro had was that, while three sucessive kings of the same nation theoretically provide a neat reason for writing a trilogy, the reigns of the monarchs proceeded in descending order of interest, a problem addressed by the casting of Sofie Gråbøl as the final king’s Queen. But, above all, the drawback of three-packs is that they are expensive and unwieldy to put on, particularly because a significant proportion of the audience tends to come to only one show in a given period.

Many viewers of Edward Bond’s The War Plays (1985), a dystopian trilogy about life after nuclear armageddon, felt they that had had enough after one or two chunks, partly because the writer-director had discouraged confidence by leaving the productions during rehearsal. All in the name … Ben Miles and Lydia Leonard in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/Guardian A textbook case of this problem occurred in New York in 2009, when producers staged a so-called “Neil Simon Season”, comprising, somewhat oddly, the first and third parts of his BB trilogy. However, after poor audiences for Brighton Beach Memoirs, the project was pulled without Broadway Bound even opening . A similar problem may face producers here and there in the next few years. The dramatist Mike Poulton has already expressed the hope that – when Hilary Mantel completes her Cromwell trilogy, with The Mirror and the Light – it might be possible to add an adaptation to a revival of the first two plays and create a theatrical trilogy to match the published one. The business difficulties can, though, already be anticipated.

The first two Poulton-Mantel plays have been renamed, in cinematic fashion, Wolf Hall 1 and Wolf Hall 2 because of evidence from the West End that the second instalment, Bring up the Bodies, sold less well than the opener, Wolf Hall. So, if Wolf Hall 3 (The Mirror and the Light) were to happen in a few years’ time, would there be enough theatre-goers keen to see the earlier works again or would sales be focused on the conclusion? One of the most popular theatrical anecdotes involves Hollywood producers changing the title of Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III to The Madness of King George, in case those seeing the original title in listings feared that they had missed the first two instalments of the George franchise. With Rona Munro’s James III, there can be no such confusion, but it will be fascinating, when the final box-office figures are in, to see if the three plays sold equally well. Trilogies, in theatre, are often three times the bother.

Lothario role gives Stephen Mangan his latest conquest - Theatre - Hampstead Highgate Express Lothario role gives Stephen Mangan his latest conquest 12:37 02 October 2008 LONDON - DECEMBER 13: (UK TABLOID NEWSPAPERS OUT) Actor Stephen Mangan poses in the awards room at the British Comedy Awards 2006 at London Television Studios on December 13, 2006 in London, England. (Photo by Dave Hogan/Getty Images) 2006 Getty Images Primrose Hill actor Stephen Mangan s speciality is for entertaining but ultimately infuriating characters. Now he s unveiling his latest – the bouncy, bearded Lothario of Alan Ayckbourn s The Norman Conquests. Katie Masters met him. When it comes to Email this article to a friend To send a link to this page you must be logged in. Primrose Hill actor Stephen Mangan's speciality is for entertaining but ultimately infuriating characters. Now he's unveiling his latest - the bouncy, bearded Lothario of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests. Katie Masters met him.

When it comes to visual comedy, you can't go far wrong with a big pair of bushy black eyebrows. Just ask Charlie Chaplin, or Rowan Atkinson. Or, for that matter, actor Stephen Mangan - best known for his role as offensive anaesthetist Guy Secretan in the Channel 4 show, Green Wing. Mangan's brows can knit his face into anything from hangdog melancholia to supercilious hauteur. In an alternative Oscar ceremony, there's a good chance they'd win the Best Supporting Actor category. Right now, they're adding a whole layer of silently expressive comedy to the actor's portrayal of Norman, the bouncy, bearded Lothario of Alan Ayckbourn's famous trilogy of plays, collectively known as The Norman Conquests. On at the Old Vic in Waterloo until the end of December, all the plays feature the same dysfunctional family and its interactions over the course of one action-packed weekend. It's the summer of 1973 and Norman is full of the joys of life - and eager to share them with as many women as he can.

At the country-vicarage-type house where his sister-in-law Annie lives, he sets to work on her, his other sister-in-law Sarah, and even - tentatively - on his wife, Ruth. Ayckbourn wrote these plays in a week, when he was 33. Each one stands alone as a brilliantly comic piece of theatre. But they've been written so that you can watch them all, in any order, to find out the full story of Norman and his machinations. "He's a livewire," says Mangan. "He doesn't like to see people miserable - it makes his soul itch. "But he's not necessarily a sympathetic character. He's less attuned to how things are going for people than he ought to be, so he's entertaining and infuriating at the same time. You should laugh at him, but pray to God that none of the women fall for him." Norman is the latest in a long line of entertaining but infuriating characters played by Mangan. The obnoxious Guy in Green Wing. Recovering alcoholic Keith in the black comedy Never Better. The ultra-competitive Josef in Confetti.

In person, though, the 40-year-old Mangan is far more considered than his bumptious alter egos. Now living in Primrose Hill with his wife, the actress Louise Delamere and their one-year-old son Harry ("inheritor of his mother's good looks and his father's comedy eyebrows"), Mangan grew up in Enfield, where his dad worked as a builder. He says he finds it mind-boggling, how different his life was from the way his parents' had been. They both grew up in Ireland and left school at 14. Yet their son went off to an English boarding school, Haileybury College in Hertfordshire - where he started a prog rock band specialising in 15-minute epics with titles like The Dragon - and went on to study law in Cambridge. But not long after Mangan graduated, his mother was diagnosed with cancer. She died aged just 45. Her mother had died aged 47. It gave Mangan a keen appreciation of how short life is. "My biggest fear is wasting time, wasting my life, sitting there on my deathbed thinking, 'Oh, I didn't do much, did I?'" he says.

"I don't believe in any afterlife. This is it." It's a very honest statement, but clearly thinking the conversation has taken too sombre a turn, he quickly undercuts it with a quip. "That doesn't make me morbidly intense," he says. "I don't wander around carrying my own coffin on my back, ringing a bell. I don't have a big clock on my wall, counting down the hours." Mangan is good company. He has all the quick wit and perfect timing of his Green Wing character, without his thick-skinned arrogance. "But I do absorb characteristics of my characters," he groans, "including Guy. On Green Wing, we had a stream of extras who'd come on set for a day or two to play a small part, and every day I'd end up running after all of them to their cars, apologising for something Guy had said. "It's like when people have a ventriloquist's dummy and that's the cover for the outrageous things they say - it wasn't me, it was the dummy." There was other embarrassment too, not least as a result of filming the series in a working hospital.

"I'd be walking along in my white coat and make-up artists would run up and powder my nose. And all the while members of the public who were in hospital would be coming past and looking at me, clearly thinking, 'God, the NHS is really going down the tube.'" Mangan trained at RADA and, after leaving, stuck initially to classical theatre - Shakespeare, Shaw, Aphra Behn. But in 2001, he was cast as Adrian Mole, in the BBC's Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years. He was, he says, pronounced ugly enough to play the part created by Sue Townsend after a through examination under a magnifying glass. Since then, his film and TV work has multiplied, with Green Wing bringing him huge exposure - enough to win the attention of the Barclaycard team, who cast him and his co-star Julien Rhind-Tutt in a lucrative series of ads. The truth is, he's a self-confessed workaholic. Four days before he got married, he was in Greenland, filming Beyond The Pole, the story of two men who walk to the Arctic, which is due out next year.

The day after his wedding, he was on another set, filming the black comedy Never Better. Even with a demanding role like Norman, there's no let-up. In November, he starts work on a Channel 4 show called Free Agents. "I'll be doing that from 6am to 6pm and then coming here to play Norman in the evenings. "And on Saturdays, we're performing all day - doing the trilogy - and then I'm filming again on Sundays. "I won't see my wife or son for two months, really...I haven't thought this through." Except, you know that he has. Mangan is a man intent on making the most of everything life has to offer. As he says, he believes in grabbing life with both hands. In that, at least, he is just like Norman. The Norman Conquests are at the Old Vic until December 20. To book, call 0870 060 6628 or log on to Email this article to a friend To send a link to this page you must be logged in.

Latest Hampstead & Highgate Stories drama, Western: Twentieth-Century Drama drama, Western Twentieth-Century Drama During the 20th cent., especially after World War I, Western drama became more internationally unified and less the product of separate national literary traditions. Throughout the century realism, naturalism, and symbolism (and various combinations of these) continued to inform important plays. Among the many 20th-century playwrights who have written what can be broadly termed naturalist dramas are Gerhart Hauptmann (German), John Galsworthy (English), John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey (Irish), and Eugene O'Neill , Clifford Odets , and Lillian Hellman (American). An important movement in early 20th-century drama was expressionism . Expressionist playwrights tried to convey the dehumanizing aspects of 20th-century technological society through such devices as minimal scenery, telegraphic dialogue, talking machines, and characters portrayed as types rather than individuals. Notable playwrights who wrote expressionist dramas include Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser (German), Karel &Ccaron;apek (Czech), and Elmer Rice and Eugene O'Neill (American). The 20th cent.

also saw the attempted revival of drama in verse, but although such writers as William Butler Yeats , W. H. Auden , T. S. Eliot , Christopher Fry , and Maxwell Anderson produced effective results, verse drama was no longer an important form in English. In Spanish, however, the poetic dramas of Federico García Lorca are placed among the great works of Spanish literature. Three vital figures of 20th-century drama are the American Eugene O'Neill, the German Bertolt Brecht, and the Italian Luigi Pirandello . O'Neill's body of plays in many forms—naturalistic, expressionist, symbolic, psychological—won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and indicated the coming-of-age of American drama. Brecht wrote dramas of ideas, usually promulgating socialist or Marxist theory. In order to make his audience more intellectually receptive to his theses, he endeavored—by using expressionist techniques—to make them continually aware that they were watching a play, not vicariously experiencing reality. For Pirandello, too, it was paramount to fix an awareness of his plays as theater; indeed, the major philosophical concern of his dramas is the difficulty of differentiating between illusion and reality.

World War II and its attendant horrors produced a widespread sense of the utter meaninglessness of human existence. This sense is brilliantly expressed in the body of plays that have come to be known collectively as the theater of the absurd. By abandoning traditional devices of the drama, including logical plot development, meaningful dialogue, and intelligible characters, absurdist playwrights sought to convey modern humanity's feelings of bewilderment, alienation, and despair—the sense that reality is itself unreal. In their plays human beings often portrayed as dupes, clowns who, although not without dignity, are at the mercy of forces that are inscrutable. Probably the most famous plays of the theater of the absurd are Eugene Ionesco 's Bald Soprano (1950) and Samuel Beckett 's Waiting for Godot (1953). The sources of the theater of the absurd are diverse; they can be found in the tenets of surrealism , Dadaism (see Dada ), and existentialism ; in the traditions of the music hall, vaudeville , and burlesque ; and in the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton .

Playwrights whose works can be roughly classed as belonging to the theater of the absurd are Jean Genet (French), Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Swiss), Fernando Arrabal (Spanish), and the early plays of Edward Albee (American). The pessimism and despair of the 20th cent. also found expression in the existentialist dramas of Jean-Paul Sartre , in the realistic and symbolic dramas of Arthur Miller , Tennessee Williams , and Jean Anouilh , and in the surrealist plays of Jean Cocteau . Somewhat similar to the theater of the absurd is the so-called theater of cruelty, derived from the ideas of Antonin Artaud , who, writing in the 1930s, foresaw a drama that would assault its audience with movement and sound, producing a visceral rather than an intellectual reaction. After the violence of World War II and the subsequent threat of the atomic bomb, his approach seemed particularly appropriate to many playwrights. Elements of the theater of cruelty can be found in the brilliantly abusive language of John Osborne 's Look Back in Anger (1956) and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

(1962), in the ritualistic aspects of some of Genet's plays, in the masked utterances and enigmatic silences of Harold Pinter 's "comedies of menace," and in the orgiastic abandon of Julian Beck 's Paradise Now! (1968); it was fully expressed in Peter Brooks's production of Peter Weiss 's Marat/Sade (1964). During the last third of the 20th cent. a few continental European dramatists, such as Dario Fo in Italy and Heiner Müller in Germany, stand out in the theater world. However, for the most part, the countries of the continent saw an emphasis on creative trends in directing rather than a flowering of new plays. In the United States and England, however, many dramatists old and new continued to flourish, with numerous plays of the later decades of the 20th cent. (and the early 21st cent.) echoing the trends of the years preceding them.

Realism in a number of guises—psychological, social, and political—continued to be a force in such British works as David Storey 's Home (1971), Sir Alan Ayckbourn 's Norman Conquests trilogy (1974), and David Hare 's Amy's View (1998); in such Irish dramas as Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) and Martin McDonagh's 1990s Leenane trilogy; and in such American plays as Jason Miller's That Championship Season (1972), Lanford Wilson 's Talley's Folly (1979), and John Guare 's Six Degrees of Separation (1990). In keeping with the tenor of the times, many of these and other works of the period were marked by elements of wit, irony, and satire. A witty surrealism also characterized some of the late 20th cent.'s theater, particularly the brilliant wordplay and startling juxtapositions of the many plays of England's Tom Stoppard .

In addition, two of late-20th-century America's most important dramatists, Sam Shepard and David Mamet (as well as their followers and imitators), explored American culture with a kind of hyper-realism mingled with echoes of the theater of cruelty in the former's Buried Child (1978), the latter's Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), and other works. While each exhibited his own very distinctive voice and vision, both playwrights achieved many of their effects through stark settings, austere language in spare dialog, meaningful silences, the projection of a powerful streak of menace, and outbursts of real or implied violence. The late decades of the 20th century were also a time of considerable experiment and iconoclasm. Experimental dramas of the 1960s and 70s by such groups as Beck's Living Theater and Jerzy Grotowski 's Polish Laboratory Theatre were followed by a mixing and merging of various kinds of media with aspects of postmodernism , improvisational techniques, performance art , and other kinds of avant-garde theater.

Some of the era's more innovative efforts included productions by theater groups such as New York's La MaMa (1961–) and Mabou Mines (1970–) and Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Co. (1976–); the Canadian writer-director Robert Lepage's intricate, sometimes multilingual works, e.g. Tectonic Plates (1988); the inventive one-man shows of such monologuists as Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, and John Leguizamo; the transgressive drag dramas of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater, e.g., The Mystery of Irma Vep (1984); and the operatic multimedia extravaganzas of Robert Wilson , e.g. White Raven (1999). Thematically, the social upheavals of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s—particularly the civil rights and women's movements, gay liberation, and the AIDS crisis—provided impetus for new plays that explored the lives of minorities and women.

Beginning with Lorraine Hansberry 's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), drama by and about African Americans emerged as a significant theatrical trend. In the 1960s plays such as James Baldwin 's Blues for Mr. Charley (1964), Amiri Baraka 's searing Dutchman (1964), and Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody (1967) explored black American life; writers including Ed Bullins (e.g., The Taking of Miss Janie, 1975), Ntozake Shange (e.g., For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, 1976) and Charles Fuller (e.g., A Soldier's Play, 1981) carried these themes into later decades. One of the most distinctive and prolific of the century's African-American playwrights, August Wilson , debuted on Broadway in 1984 with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and continued to define the black American experience in his ongoing dramatic cycle into the next century.

Feminist and other women-centered themes dramatized by contemporary female playwrights were plentiful in the 1970s and extended in the following decades. Significant figures included England's Caryl Churchill (e.g., the witty Top Girls, 1982), the Cuban-American experimentalist Maria Irene For&nacute;es (e.g., Fefu and Her Friends, 1977) and American realists including Beth Henley (e.g., Crimes of the Heart, 1978), Marsha Norman (e.g., 'Night Mother, 1982), and Wendy Wasserstein (e.g., The Heidi Chronicles, 1988). Skilled monologuists also provided provocative female-themed one-women shows such as Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues (1996) and various solo theatrical performances by Lily Tomlin, Karen Finley, Anna Deveare Smith, Sarah Jones, and others. Gay themes (often in works by gay playwrights) also marked the later decades of the 20th cent.

Homosexual characters had been treated sympathetically but in the context of pathology in such earlier 20th-century works as Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934) and Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy (1953). Gay subjects were presented more explicitly during the 1960s, notably in the English farces of Joe Orton and Matt Crowley's witty but grim portrait of pre-Stonewall American gay life, The Boys in the Band (1968). In later years gay experience was explored more frequently and with greater variety and openness, notably in Britain in Martin Sherman's Bent (1979) and Peter Gill's Mean Tears (1987) and in the United States in Jane Chambers' Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (1980), Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy (1981), Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1986), David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988), which also dealt with Asian identity, and Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey (1993).

Tony Kushner 's acclaimed two-part Angels in America (1991–92) is generally considered the century's most brilliant and innovative theatrical treatment of the contemporary gay world. Sections in this article: The Mill at Sonning - Round and Round the Garden The Mill at Sonning - Round and Round the Garden 1st October to 21st November 2015. Review from the Newbury Weekly News. Round and round the mill Round and Round the Garden, at The Mill at Sonning, until November 21 When Alan Ayckbourn mentioned in passing that he thought a trilogy would be a good idea, so a journalist reported that he was writing one – he got on and wrote one – well three actually... plays, that is. Known collectively as The Norman Conquests, Table Manners was the first, Living Together followed and this play was the third. All three are complete in themselves and follow the misadventures of Norman, an assistant librarian, played with, a good sense of comedy by James Wallace, his in-laws and a vet, over a weekend in an English country house. The house belongs to Annie, nicely underplayed by Nellie Harker as the easy-going sister.

Annie talks about having an affair as getting it off her chest or out of her system – 'Like a laxative!'. Chris Potter gave a poignant, well- observed portrayal of Tom, the vet who knows exactly how to treat or look after any animal but is hopeless at human relations. Harry Gosteloe did well as Reg, a man who can discuss 10 different ways of travelling from home to East Grinstead and bore his listeners to death. Norman, meanwhile, attempts to seduce both Annie, her sister Sarah (Susannah Harker, with good comedy timing) and finally his own wife, with comic and various degrees of success. In typical Ayckbourn fashion, the characters weave around each other, rarely saying what they really mean and setting up all sorts of misunderstandings. In one hilarious sequence Sarah Edwardson, strong in the part of Ruth, Norman's wife, attempts to get some sort of reaction or even spark of life put of the hapless Tom by setting him up and pretending that she loves him, only for him to take her seriously and go and confess to the woman he should be courting, Annie.

Ayckbourn once said he usually felt he was peering out of a foxhole as critics took potshots at him, but with this trilogy he was standing up. He later expressed surprise at the number of enthusiastic reviews he got. Unobtrusively directed by Abigail Anderson and with an impressive set designed by Michael Holt, this production flowed along seamlessly and I had no desire whatsoever to take any potshots at the author, standing up or crouching down. DEREK ANSELL 2010-2011 Season – Cygnet Blog Posted on March 8, 2011 by Sean Fanning You Just Can’t Cheat! What can I say about executing a set at the Theatre in Old Town? It’s not your everyday scene shop. As I pull up to the parking lot next to the theatre, I find myself peering over the rustic fence at the lumber racks, sawhorses, and various bits of flats from old productions. This is the shop, where the thermostat seems to vary as much as San Diego weather, and the paint takes eons to dry on a damp day, or dries too quickly in the hot sun.

And the rain is a constant threat that can set us back days at a time! The talented team of carpenters under Technical Director Andy Scrimger use the yard behind the theatre to pre-build our scenery in parts. It’s a tricky planning process, due to a few approaches we use on our sets, which I’ll get to in a moment. Andy began working with Cygnet in 2009, and has consistently been one to balance the needs of the budget with the demands of quality. Any technical director would tell you this is not an easy task. These days, we work together to implement strategies towards putting up a set by being very frugal, and as a byproduct (and a constant goal) using green, sustainable methods of creating scenery. Continue reading → Posted on February 28, 2011 by Sean Fanning Cabaret as an Alcoholic Beverage Last year, Sean Murray asked me to work with him on Sweeney Todd. It was our seventh production together.

Working with Sean and co-director James Vasquez was possibly the most freeing experience that can be asked of a designer for a musical theatre setting: we threw out all preconceived notions of the staging, we started from scratch and found our own voices in the piece. And I discovered that doing a musical on a thrust stage means that, despite the amount of decorative flourishes I may apply to a setting, my eye always becomes inexorably riveted to the performer. Out there on that thrust surrounded on three sides by a rapt audience, and commanding a story. In one breathless moment, I can forget about everything I’ve been hired or trained to do as a designer, as I sit back and watch energy flow. Continue reading → Meet Stephen Metcalfe Posted on December 7, 2010 by Manny Fernandes In January 2011, Cygnet Theatre will have the honor of producing its very first World Premiere – The Tragedy of the Commons, by celebrity playwright Stephen Metcalfe. Stephen Metcalfe, a nationally renowned stage writer, is possibly most recognized for such Hollywood blockbusters as Pretty Woman (with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere) and Mr.

Holland’s Opus (with Richard Dreyfuss). CT: Did you start out writing for film? SM: I started out as a playwright. Between 1978 and 1985 I wrote five full length plays and perhaps half a dozen one act plays. Even though all the work was produced, I was in no way, shape or form making a living from it. At one point I thought it might be a relief to go into advertising. CT: What are some of the differences between writing for film versus the stage? SM: I discovered early on how difficult plot can be. In the theatre, plot is an excuse for people to talk. In a movie, it’s a reason for them to blow things up. Here’s another difference. If a play is a house, others can decorate, but they can’t tear down the walls. It’s yours, you own it. If a screenplay is a house, people can tear it down to the foundation, dig a deep hole and throw away the key. They own it.

(This doesn’t mean that sometimes you don’t get the credit – or blame – for what they did.) In the theatre no one is asking you to be a playwright – in fact, if pressed, they’d probably tell you to go into advertising – but if you write a play, they’ll read it. In film, no one reads anything. But if they hear you’ve done something that’s pretty good, they’ll pay you to do something else. CT: What impact did your success with Pretty Woman have on your career as a writer? SM: For better or for worse, in 1991 I wrote the production draft of the screenplay for Pretty Woman. And so for the next ten years the phone rang pretty much on a weekly basis with someone – who, as mentioned, had usually never read my work – asking me to re-write a romantic comedy. The problem was I didn’t consider myself a writer of romantic comedies. But as I was trying to do silly things like pay a mortgage and raise a family, as often as not I’d take the job. But in between re-writing romantic comedies I continued to write my own screenplays on spec. This, to some extent, took the place of my writing for the theatre.

It felt the same. My own screenplays I hoped/felt were character and dialogue driven and were emotionally grounded; they felt to me as if they were about real things. Of course, they didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting made. CT: What prompted you to begin writing for the stage again? SM: In 2005 I had a growing realization that though I’ve made a living as writer, the best work I’ve done is probably sitting on shelves in LA somewhere. Did I mention that a dramatist writes for actors and an audience? The writing is not the end unto itself, seeing it done is. And so, with this in mind, the desire to see work done, I find myself writing plays again. I have no fantasies I’ll make a living doing it but that’s okay. I’m also going into advertising. (One Woman’s Journey into an Oversized T-Shirt.) Posted on August 18, 2010 by Jessica John I’ll admit it…When it comes to fashion; I’m a girly-girl. Almost everyone who knows me has ultimately asked me if I OWN a shoe without a heel.

Skirts and sundresses are my summer uniform and a day without earrings is a day spent tugging naked earlobes. So my brown “i conquered norman” t-shirt was something of an anomaly to me on the morning of Cygnet’s THE NORMAN CONQUESTS All-Day Opening Extravaganza. Three full-length plays taken-in with a theatre full of audience members I’d known or met through the years and nary a piece of clothing in my closet to match that ringspun cotton crew-neck. Noon-time found me anxiously awaiting the first CONQUEST of the day… Round and Round the Garden . I admire every one of those gorgeous actors, (not to mention both of the gifted directors and all of the amazing designers and crew) and I am an Alan Ayckbourn fanatic. There was so much talent ready to bring the story of the “quirky assistant librarian” and his “oddball in-laws” to life.

I tapped my foot nervously – my foot, donned in a suede knee-high boot picked to match my jeans, jewel-encrusted belt and a thin-belted, rich red sweater… (My Norman t-shirt peeked out in protest.) Well, at least our new Cygnet logo was visible. It matched my sweater perfectly. And I WAS wearing the t-shirt…my show-support evident, if anyone was inclined to check. Continue reading → Straight from the horse’s mouth Posted on July 13, 2010 by Manny Fernandes One of the questions we often get about The Norman Conquests is regarding the order in which the plays should be seen. Up until this point, we have said that part of the beauty of the trilogy is that it doesn’t really matter what order you see them in. All three plays stand on completely on their own, and since they are all set during the same weekend, the order they are viewed in doesn’t matter. I have recently, however, discovered an article from Alan Ayckbourn himself, in which he explains in his own words the order in which you should see them for best viewing pleasure.

The article was taken from The Ayckbourn Guides which were compiled by Simon Murgatroyd. Enjoy! Alan Ayckbourn Explains… If you are in the process of reading this Programme, the chances are that you are already about to see, are in the midst of seeing, or have already seen, at least one of the plays that form The Norman Conquests. In which case, this advice is not for you. Do not read on. For those who have seen none of the plays but may be wishing to do so, it is hoped that the following notes may prove useful. The first thing to remember is, understandably, don’t see Table Manners first. This will give you a wrong time sequence and will only confuse you when you come to see, say, Living Together which, incidentally, you are strongly advised not to see second. Ideally, Round and Round the Garden should not be seen before you have seen Table Manners – but do not, on the other hand, fall into that old trap of seeing Round and Round the Garden after Living Together as this again will confuse the sequences of dramatic events.

Do not see Living Together first as this will severely curtail a lot of the pleasure you gain from seeing Table Manners for the first time which latter play, for maximum enjoyment you should try and save till the end. In short, do try and see all three plays first, or, if you really can’t manage this, last. This way you will avoid any disappointment. Like most things in this world, there is a logical progression i.e. Parts 1, 3 and finally, of course, 2. ﻿I certainly hope this helped to clear things up. If not, contact the box office, and they will be more than happy to assist you in scheduling all three plays first (or last, if that is your preference). Cygnet’s 8th Season! Posted on February 14, 2010 by Manny Fernandes We are delighted to announce our 2010/2011 line-up. Our eighth season will offer productions ranging from a world renowned classic to a world premiere and kicking it all off will be something never before done at Cygnet Theatre – a trilogy of connected plays performed in repertory!

To start the season, we will revisit the works of Alan Ayckbourn, author of our immensely popular production of Communicating Doors . This time instead of traveling through time, we will visit the same time as seen in three different rooms, all of which get their own play! The Norman Conquests – which includes Table Manners , Round and Round the Garden and Living Together – revolve around Norman a charming library assistant, and the women in his life. Each play stands on its own, however, the fun is in seeing the entire trilogy as each play reveals unique secrets, surprising answers and loads of laughs. Directed by Artistic Director Sean Murray and Francis Gercke, The Norman Conquests will run in rep with the same six actors from July 28th through November 2nd, 2010.

THEATER; Punching Holes In Space And Time - The New York Times The New York Times Theater |THEATER; Punching Holes In Space And Time Search THEATER; Punching Holes In Space And Time By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH Continue reading the main story ''TIME is just one color in the playwright's palette,'' Alan Ayckbourn has said, ''to be spread, mixed, thinned and splattered as required.'' Very true, in the realm of metaphor. Backstage, as the clock ticks, matters may look quite different, as Mr. Ayckbourn well knows. ''There is no sharper lesson for a dramatist,'' he has said, ''than to find himself sharing a dressing-room with an actor for whom he has written an impossible quick change.'' At 63, Mr. Ayckbourn has written going on 60 plays, all sprung from practical experience, untainted by formal study. And what practical experience! Straight from school at age 17, he joined the touring company of Donald Wolfit, last of Britain's old-school star-managers, as assistant stage manager. Then came a string of jobs in the provinces.

Acting, painting scenery, making props, producing, directing: the budding dramatist did it all. In 1970, he settled down as director of productions and de facto playwright in residence at the Library Theater in Scarborough in out-of-the-way North Yorkshire, pouring a lifetime of on-the-job training into scripts that play like clockwork. Surely Mr. Ayckbourn, of all people, would know better than to take time literally. Yet now he has done just that, with a vengeance. ''House'' and ''Garden'' (no, not ''House and Garden'') -- first performed in Scarborough in 1999 -- interlock like the wheel and anchor of the escapement in a flawless timepiece. In previews at Manhattan Theater Club's Stage I and Stage II, the plays (plural, not singular) open on May 21. Among the cast, directed by John Tillinger, are Veanne Cox, Michael Countryman, Daniel Gerroll and Jan Maxwell.

''House'' unfolds in the summer sitting room of an English country house described in the stage directions as ''tastefully shabby, cluttered, casual.'' ''Garden'' (complete with Maypole dance and cloudburst) plays outdoors, in an overgrown ''lower meadow,'' separated from the house by an unseen formal garden. In ''Garden,'' as in ''House,'' the same marriages implode for the same reasons, Cupid plays his tricks on the same pairs of lovers young and old, the same political ambitions come to naught. Written to be performed simultaneously in adjacent theaters, the two plays cover the same period of stage time. Every character in one also appears in the other, sometimes moving from one to the other with no more than seconds to spare. The plays are not being sold as a package. Ticket buyers may choose just one.

(One wonders: are the actors paid double?) Continue reading the main story Totally congruent, yet totally unalike in incident, tone and emphasis, the pair of plays resembles nothing so much as those flabbergasting two-part word puzzles known as acrostics, in which the answers to one part of the puzzle are transposed, letter by letter, into a grid, where they spell out an extended passage of a text (the source of which is spelled out by the first letters of the words to be transferred into the grid). Advertisement Continue reading the main story ''Puzzles are constructed according to constraints,'' said Will Shortz, the crossword editor for The New York Times, commenting on the comparison. ''But a puzzle doesn't need to do anything more than satisfy those constraints. The idea of these plays makes me think of a very tightly written thriller where every detail not only belongs to some secret pattern but also fulfills its function in the plot.'' ''House'' and ''Garden'' have a precursor of sorts in Mr.

Ayckbourn's 1974 trilogy, ''The Norman Conquests,'' which puts the same six characters through their paces in the dining room (''Table Manners''), sitting room (''Living Together'') and garden (''Round and Round the Garden'') of the same house on the same dreadful weekend. ''I'm not one of those careful, methodic, over-all planners,'' Mr. Ayckbourn writes in the preface to ''The Norman Conquests,'' protesting perhaps too much. Each of the three plays -- like one particular perspective of a single statue -- has its own coherence, as do ''House'' and ''Garden.'' But the trilogy's dozen scenes cover different periods of time. So it would be possible, on a suitably flexible set, to rearrange them as one grand, chronological ''Norman'' marathon, much as Francis Ford Coppola recut the theatrical releases ''The Godfather'' and ''The Godfather: Part 2'' for the televised ''Godfather Saga.'' Inextricable from the idea of time in the scheme for ''House'' and ''Garden'' is the issue of place. Mr.

Ayckbourn is hardly alone among playwrights in feeling the gravitational pull of events offstage. Tom Stoppard showed a similar susceptibility in ''Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead'' (1966), the photonegative of Shakespeare's ''Hamlet.'' Like Vladimir and Estragon, in Samuel Beckett's ''Waiting for Godot,'' Mr. Stoppard's shiftless twosome spend their lives where the action isn't, forever hoping for their cue. In the play of their lives, Hamlet is the walk-on. ''We do onstage the things that are supposed to happen off,'' says Mr. Stoppard's Player, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's principal interlocutor, encapsulating Mr. Stoppard's method. ''Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.'' Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy In ''Tamara'' (1981), set against the backdrop of Mussolini's Fascist Italy, the Canadian playwright John Krizanc raised such games to a higher power.

His inspiration came from the servants in plays by Chekhov, characters who, though they dropped a line in only here and there and then disappeared into the kitchen, were the ones he wanted to follow. The New York production at the Seventh Regiment Armory spilled from the grand staircase to multiple locations on three floors, with audiences (''invisible'' to each other and the actors) trailing cast members as fancy dictated. Upstairs, you might have followed the Mephistophelean poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, the master of the house, or his glamorous guest, the Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka. You could follow the servants downstairs to the kitchen. Or you could keep changing your mind. One trouble, for those not exhilarated by it all, was that you might lose your chosen protagonist, or that the fragments you walked in on randomly might not add up to much of a play at all: the perils of free choice. Maybe even today, in the on-demand anarchy of our broad-band, bazillion-channel culture, control of a story is best left in the hands of real storytellers. Consider the series ''24,'' the cliff-hanging political thriller on Fox, building to its finale later this month.

''Right now, terrorists are plotting to assassinate a presidential candidate,'' Kiefer Sutherland would intone at the start of each episode. ''My wife and daughter have been targeted and people I work with may be involved in both. I'm Federal Agent Jack Bauer and today is going to be the longest day of my life.'' Though the plot has spiraled off in more directions than ''Tamara,'' a viewer has never been left behind, thanks in part to a rigorous, apparently gratuitous, device. One hour of screen time equals one hour of real time. To keep up with the diverging plot lines, the show often resorted to split screens. As a voiceover kept reminding in commercial breaks, ''Every second counts.'' Superficially, the inexorable time scheme of ''24'' looks a lot like the time scheme of ''House'' and ''Garden.'' Still, there is a crucial distinction. The times that flash on the screen during the episodes of ''24'' are virtual, manufactured in the cutting room. The (mostly) offstage ''Hamlet'' that drives ''Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead'' is similarly a fiction.

But the synchronicities of ''House'' and ''Garden,'' like those of ''Tamara,'' go beyond ingenious formal conceit. They must play in real time and are subject to the tyranny of the clock. Why make one's job so difficult? To raise the stakes? For the sheer, useless beauty of the thing? To prove it can be done? Advertisement Continue reading the main story Perhaps to do what Hamlet says it is the very purpose of drama to do: to hold the mirror up to Nature. No proscenium (not even the wooden O of Shakespeare's Globe) encompasses all the ripples that expand into infinity around a story. An extra perspective adds new dimensions, and we need them. But unlike coins and tapestries, with their front and flip sides, the world of human experience is cubist, every ego the center of its own little universe that intersects and clashes and collides with countless others. ''Tamara'' undertook to enact rather than merely assert this truth. So, too, do ''House'' and ''Garden.''

Question: Which dramatist wrote the trilogy of plays known collectively as 'The Norman Conquests'?
Answer: ALAN AYCKBOURN